“Hi my name is Dr. Wachtel and today we’re going to talk about a condition called athlete’s foot.Athlete’s foot is a very common condition we see in our practice. The biggest problem of athlete’s foot is it can occur all year round in the foot. It typically presents as an itchy rash, flaky lesions on the bottom of the foot, it can occur between your toe spaces or web spaces where the skin becomes very red, wet, and white.

The condition is a problem that can be treated quite easily. Many times patients come into our practice and have been to other doctor’s which have applied lots of cream and some have not worked because it truly was not fungus. In our practice the majority of the time we will take a piece of skin and actually send it to a laboratory to confirm a true diagnosis of fungus. The other problems that we see with this disease is that’s it’s contagious in the sense that you can cross infect yourself many times. The fungus infection isn’t just typically on your skin but also in your shoes.

The first part of the treatment is diagnosing it correctly by taking a piece of skin. After we confirm a diagnosis of fungal infection we have a topical medication. Sometimes the prescription we provide is for both the irritation as well as the fungus. And sometimes we’ll just write a prescription strength anti-fungal. There are times that it gets so severe that we have to give oral medication.

Lastly we have some very interesting other ways of treating the fungal infection from the shoe so that it doesn’t infect your skin. We have a shoe treatment we insert into the shoe which radiates and eradicates the infection as well. At the end of the day our treatments for fungal infection of the skin can vary from a topical to treating the shoes to treating both.”